Safe for democracy, p.45
Safe for Democracy, page 45
Meanwhile Project Ate accelerated. Two final postponements resulted in an invasion set for April 17. On April 1 Admiral Dennison received marching orders in a Joint Chiefs memorandum. The navy reinforced Guantanamo in case Castro should move against it, and Adm. Arleigh Burke, chief of naval operations, quietly put two battalions of Marines on transports in the area just in case. Dennison provided a flotilla built around the carrier Essex. Destroyers Eaton and Murray, with superior navigation gear, would accompany the invasion fleet to the Bay of Pigs while amphibious ship San Marcos carried the exile landing craft with their vehicles and some supplies. A submarine would carry out a diversion at a point off Pinar del Rio, at the other end of Cuba. Dennison’s instructions were to avoid association with the exile fleet.
The Cubans sailed not from Guatemala but from Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, code-named Trampoline. The rebel navy began assembling early in April, starting with the CIA’s Blagar and Barbara J. Five merchant vessels of the Garcia Shipping Company, chartered by the CIA, carried the bulk of Brigade 2506. When Grayston Lynch, whose ship arrived at the port on April 1, viewed aerial photos of the new landing site at the Bay of Pigs and the nearby village of Playa Girón, he saw coral reefs. Photo interpreters told Lynch he was wrong. Cubans on his ship actually knew the reefs and confirmed to the CIA contract officer they existed. A brigade doctor pointed out the reefs to Colonel Egan during the final briefings. The Trax base commander insisted they were looking at clouds. The disaster proceeded to unfold with the scripted style of a Kabuki play.
The secret warriors worried about JFK’s inflexibility on the invasion. They knew well enough the signs of an operation gone awry. Esterline’s section chiefs assembled on April 9, right after his return from the Guatemala visit and just before Hawkins went to Puerto Cabezas for the brigade embarkation. Bissell had called the meeting. At the last moment Doris Mirage, his secretary, phoned to say the DDO would be delayed. The group repaired to an agency hangout, Napoleon’s, a restaurant on Connecticut Avenue. Jim Flannery, one of Bissell’s special assistants, went with them. They began with martinis and went on to brandy before task force operations chief Richard Drain raised the forbidden question: “Have any of you entertained the notion that this damned thing might not work?” The last-minute switch in the target area boded ill.
Drain suggested they could just not go back to work. Had the Cuba task force walked off the job in the middle of the pre-invasion workup, that would surely have ended Project Ate. Some looked uncomfortable; Jack Hawkins was angry. No one said anything. Finally Jake Esterline chimed in, “Let’s go back.”
When one of the group asked why, the task force chief replied, with great emphasis, “Because we’re good soldiers, that’s why.”
Within a week Esterline and Hawkins would be at Richard Bissell’s house trying to resign.
On April 10 the exile force began moving from Trax and the other bases. At Trampoline 316 support personnel, including 159 Americans, assisted in loading. The ship Rio Escondido, slowed by propeller damage from a log when departing New Orleans, sailed on April 11, the fastest vessels on the night of 13/14. Tracy Barnes and a senior paramilitary man went to New York on April 12 to inform the Cuban politicians. By this time the Frente had widened to include Manolo Ray, unacceptable to Howard Hunt. Hunt finally had to be relieved and relegated to work with Dave Phillips and the propaganda unit.
President Kennedy still reserved his final decision, with an option to cancel the invasion up to twenty-four hours before the landing. Although a military man sent to observe loading reported the situation chaotic and the shipping inadequate, the president’s qualms were resolved by a cable from Jack Hawkins:
MY OBSERVATIONS HAVE INCREASED MY CONFIDENCE IN THE ABILITY OF THIS FORCE TO ACCOMPLISH NOT ONLY INITIAL COMBAT MISSIONS BUT ALSO THE ULTIMATE OBJECTIVE, THE OVERTHROW OF CASTRO. THE BRIGADE AND BATTALION COMMANDERS NOW KNOW ALL DETAILS OF THE PLAN AND ARE VERY ENTHUSIASTIC. THESE OFFICERS ARE YOUNG, VIGOROUS, INTELLIGENT, AND MOTIVATED WITH A FANATICAL URGE TO BEGIN BATTLE. . . . THEY SAY THEY KNOW THEIR PEOPLE AND BELIEVE AFTER THEY HAVE INFLICTED ONE SERIOUS DEFEAT UPON THE OPPOSITION FORCES, THE LATTER WILL MELT AWAY FROM CASTRO. . . . I SHARE THEIR CONFIDENCE.
THE BRIGADE IS . . . MORE HEAVILY ARMED AND BETTER EQUIPPED IN SOME RESPECTS THAN U.S. INFANTRY UNITS. THE MEN HAVE RECEIVED . . . MORE FIRING EXPERIENCE THAN U.S. TROOPS WOULD NORMALLY RECEIVE. I WAS IMPRESSED WITH THE SERIOUS ATTITUDE OF THE MEN.
Kennedy gave the go-ahead. When it was all over and the brigade leaders returned from captivity, reporter Haynes Johnson showed them the cable. Unanimously the exiles insisted that they were told nothing about the actual plan until the final moment of embarkation.
The effort to destroy Castro’s air force was the first, crucial action of Project Ate. It carried the code name JM/Fury. If not eliminated, FAR airplanes posed a tremendous threat. Castro’s inventory included six B-26 bombers, four T-33 jet trainers modified to be fighters, and two to four British Sea Fury fighters. Principal bases were at Havana and Santiago. A surprise air attack scheduled two days before the invasion would seem to do the trick, and any remaining planes would be bombed at dawn after the landing. That was the plan. A follow-up strike the day before the invasion dropped out of the planning.
There was no lack of warnings on the criticality of this element. On their way to a late White House meeting, General Gray asked Tracy Barnes whether the senior officials had ever been told that the full air preparation was a necessity. Barnes admitted not but told Gray not to worry, yet never did anything about it. Similarly Richard Bissell brought in air force Gen. Leo Geary for a last-minute assessment. Geary concluded that the air plan would be adequate only if implemented in all its aspects. Bissell made choices that precluded that possibility.
The CIA hoped to conceal the exiles’ hand, claiming the air strikes were by Castro defectors. To this end the agency acquired two extra B-26 bombers simply to fly from Nicaragua to Florida where the pilots would retail the cover story. Sixteen bombers would hit six Cuban air bases in the real attack.
When Kennedy continued insisting on reducing visibility, Bissell, on his own, halved the initial strike force. Gar Thorsrud had to scale back targets, to only main airfields, to be hit by eight bombers. These reductions in the planned air missions were a major reason for doubts among Esterline’s staff.
The mission proved successful as far as it went. The exile planes achieved surprise. Shortly after dawn on April 15, 1961, about half of Castro’s air force was smashed.
Jake Esterline telephoned Bissell and said he and Jack Hawkins absolutely had to sit down with him and talk. They appeared on Bissell’s doorstep in the Glover Park neighborhood of Washington. Esterline took the cutbacks in Project Ate to their logical conclusion: there remained no good faith expectation for success. He and Hawkins wanted to resign. Bissell questioned their loyalty and shamed them into staying on. In 1975, speaking to CIA interviewer Jack Pfeiffer, Bissell professed not to recall this at all. Esterline and Hawkins together did an interview with the historian Peter Kornbluh in 1996. In it the former task force chief declared, “I am forced to a very unhappy conclusion and that is that he [Bissell] was lying down and lying up for reasons that I don’t yet totally understand.”
Almost immediately the bombing cover story began unraveling. The exile planes from Nicaragua reached Florida as planned. One landed at Opa-Locka, the other at Miami International Airport where its pilot, Mario Zuñiga, recited the prearranged tale that he was a disaffected FAR pilot. Photographed by the press, pictures of Zuñiga’s B-26 were flashed almost immediately to New York, where the United Nations had turned to Cuba.
The pictures clearly showed FAR markings, which the CIA had thoughtfully painted on the aircraft. Adlai Stevenson exhibited them in the debate, using the photos to deny U.S. complicity. But the photos showed too much—the Miami B-26 had a special nose assembly with machine guns, devised for the Indonesia operation; Castro’s B-26s had plastic noses for a bombardier. An enterprising reporter discovered that the bomber’s guns were taped up and thus could not have been fired. It also strained credulity that a group of spontaneous defectors could launch a simultaneous strike at different bases. In addition, Henry Raymont, the UPI reporter in Havana, saw the attack planes and confirmed they had no markings. Exposed as a fabrication, Stevenson’s statement flopped. The ambassador realized that Tracy Barnes had deceived him. Embarrassed, Kennedy sent McGeorge Bundy to New York with a fuller account for Stevenson.
President Kennedy tamped down the next round of CIA bombings to avoid a UN debacle. Then he directed Mac Bundy to issue fresh orders to Dulles, Rusk, and McNamara prohibiting any employment of U.S. forces. In addition: “The specific plan for paramilitary support, Nestor, has been rejected, and the President does not wish further planning of any such operations for an invasion of Cuba. There will be quiet disengagement from associations developed in connection with Nestor.” But Kennedy was too late to cancel the next part of the CIA plan—a diversionary landing in Oriente province that night.
Meanwhile Col. Stanley Beerli at the CIA’s Air Operations Center planned a follow-up air strike to neutralize the remainder of Castro’s air force. Communications intelligence indicated that Castro’s last aircraft had regrouped at San Antonio base. Beerli and his assistants selected targets from the latest U-2 photographs. Then fate again intervened, in the person of CIA Deputy Director Charles Cabell.
This was his moment. In seven years at the agency, Cabell had seen good times and bad. As DDCI he had helped create the CIA as we know it. General Cabell had come from the air force, a long-service reconnaissance man and one of its early photo interpretation experts. At one time he had been in charge of setting intelligence requirements for his service, and he had headed air intelligence too. Cabell had twice worked for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, including during the Korean War, so he knew the interservice arena. A master pilot, he had briefly commanded a bomber group in the campaign against Germany. Somehow Central Casting had come up with Cabell as the prototype for a figure that became a fixture at CIA: the savvy officer who could fill in the intel types on what they needed and get CIA the things it wanted. A down-home sort, Cabell liked Westerns, the tropics, and Mexican cooking. Cuba should have been right up his alley. Instead he presided over one of the project’s key operational failures.
Allen Dulles, as part of the cover, had a speaking engagement in Puerto Rico that he had accepted long before, so Cabell had command that weekend. His arrangement with Dulles provided for the two to be interchangeable, each cognizant of all aspects of CIA business. In addition, Cabell chaired the CIA Watch Committee and could comment authoritatively on current intelligence. He considered himself on top of the case.
Returning from an April 16 golf date in sport shirt and slacks, General Cabell heard that Quarters Eye had gotten the final “go” for the invasion by telephone at 1 P.M. Cabell reviewed the plans. He learned of Beerli’s latest air strike, asking if it had been approved. Aware of the UN embarrassment, Cabell wanted to check with Dean Rusk even though Beerli insisted everything was fine. About 9:30 P.M., McGeorge Bundy, alerted by Rusk, called with JFK’s decision that no further strikes be launched until Brigade 2506 captured an airstrip inside Cuba. The net effect cut air support to the missions already flown rather than the forty-odd flights once programmed (but not in fact proposed to the president, who had only been asked to approve strikes on D-2 and on D-Day).
The order struck Cabell “like a falling bomb.” He thought the go-ahead included all subsidiary measures, such as the air strike. At this point Richard Bissell entered. The DDO demanded reconsideration. He and Cabell rushed to Rusk’s office, appealing to him. General Cabell knew air like a cook knows beans, and advanced a series of reasons why Castro’s airfields should be struck. Rusk rejected their entreaties, except for allowing the exile air force to fly support over the beaches. Both CIA officials protested vigorously; Rusk finally phoned the president and put their arguments to him. Cabell concedes that Rusk rendered his points accurately. JFK again rejected the air strike. In history this refusal became the third factor in assigning Kennedy the full blame for the Cuba failure.
A veteran of bombing campaigns, General Cabell knew their weaknesses and, well steeped in the JM/Ate plan, knew that it hinged on success in taking out Castro’s air force. He also recounts his understanding that the invasion could no longer be called off. With the strikes he believed the operation to be risky but feasible. Now the president wanted to reject a measure Cabell considered absolutely vital. Yet he declined Rusk’s offer to speak directly to the president. That was Cabell’s error, not Kennedy’s. “I don’t think there’s any point,” the general said. Rusk held out the phone to Bissell. “I think I agree with that,” the DO director added. Cabell felt pressed for time with everything that needed doing at headquarters. Only later, in retrospect, did he ask himself if one says “no” when asked to speak to the president. In his memoir Bissell would write: “Today I view this decision of Cabell’s and mine as a major mistake. For the record, we should have spoken to the president and made as strong a case as possible on behalf of the operation and the welfare of the brigade.”
Returning to the agency, the CIA officials went directly to the WH/4 offices to report the denial of their appeal. Bissell let Cabell tell the bad news. “There’s been a little change in our marching orders,” Cabell said. They would have to go “headsy, headsy.” Esterline and others were dumbfounded. The room rang with expressions of frustration.
Jack Hawkins hit the table with his fist. “Goddamn it, this is criminal negligence.”
Jake Esterline added tightly, “This is the goddamnest thing I have ever heard of.”
Tracy Barnes drafted the “FLASH” precedence cable to Trampoline canceling the air attack. Gar Thorsrud received it just half an hour before the strike aircraft were to launch. Some pilots were already in their cockpits. General Cabell is proud that no one suggested a bit of foot-dragging to let the strike go through. By 4 A.M. he and Bissell were speaking to Rusk again, on the telephone, begging for authorization to have U.S. Navy aircraft fly air cover for the invasion fleet and support over the beachhead. Cabell met Rusk in the latter’s apartment at the Park-Sheraton Hotel. Rusk opened the door in his bathrobe. This time Rusk insisted that Cabell speak to the president, and the White House switchboard reached JFK at his Glen Ora, Virginia, estate. After a brief exchange, Rusk got on the phone, then conveyed Kennedy’s refusal.
Missions would be restricted to direct support over the beaches on the first day. There would be thirteen exile B-26 sorties, none of them against FAR bases. Castro’s air force got its chance.
Another narrative of these events is that of the Cubans, both enthusiastic supporters of Fidel Castro and those who sought to unseat him. Castro quite consciously used the CIA secret war and Washington’s overt hostile measures as proof of the need for his countrymen to pull together for the revolution. What clearer demonstration could there be than a CIA invasion? The anti-Castro resistance could be—and was—attributed to the Americans because it had CIA help. Reasonable Cubans could argue the realities. The invasion was another matter: such an act could only happen at the instigation of the “Yanquis.” The hand of the CIA became Castro’s best organizing tool. The anti-Castro Cubans, meanwhile, had their own angle. Exile fighter Alfredo Duran forthrightly told the retrospective Musgrove Plantation conference in 1996, “The feeling among the people in the brigade was that we were using the CIA, not the CIA using us; that we had a purpose and the purpose was going back to Cuba.” The contending forces clashed at Playa Girón, as the Cuban revolutionaries know the Bay of Pigs battle, and they view its outcome as a victory for the Cuban people.
Much depended on the internal resistance. Over rum and dominos in Miami, or drinking beers in the spartan bar at Puerto Cabezas, Cuban exiles spent endless hours on this, probably even more than Kennedy, whose deliberations often ranged over the subject. Even the fidelistas concede the revolt began early and burned on. Project Ate’s original purpose was precisely as a line of support to the resistance. The revolution applied unevenly across Cuba. In some places cadres made mistakes, in some they lacked a correct political analysis, in others the new bosses succumbed to the same corruption as the old ones.
Agrarian reform could be a double-edged tool: one could demand bribes to delay seizing the land just as easily as take it over. Las Villas province figured in CIA reports as strongly anti-Castro. Someone put the number 70 percent to that opposition, though opinion polls were a rarity in 1961 in Cuba, and certainly the agency never had permission to take any. Jake Esterline commented later that a poll would have been more useful than the spy reports he got out of Cuba. Las Villas happened to be one of the places the fidelistas had gotten off to a bad start, where peasants were run off their land or shaken down around Sagua la Grande and Sanctí Spiritus. There had also been difficulties with the literacy programs (Cuba had a million people then who could not read or were only semi-literate), and Cuban guajiros can only have been shaken when Castro’s commandantes pulled the teachers back. Las Villas contained the Escambray Mountains. There had been no land reform at all. Both Trinidad and Playa Girón were in Las Villas, Trinidad below the Escambray, the Bay of Pigs to the west, closer to Havana.
One thing the CIA got right was to plot the invasion in the Cuban province most hostile to Fidel. But clandestine supply efforts reflected no strong consciousness of this. Almost half of everything landed by sea went to Havana province. Of the rest, the vast majority went to Matanzas, with Las Villas left somewhere behind along with Pinar del Rio and Camaguey.
